www.rambler-info.org.uk - UTM according to the Austrian Alpine ClubAAC or OAV

Not what I would understand as "best practice"

To open a typical hut page in a second window, click here. Look at the foot of the hut page and you can see the following departures from what I understand to be correct practice.

No reference is made to the letter and number that specifies the sector in use. There is reference to "Bezugsmeridian: 15°" on a separate line. 15° is indeed the centre-line of Sector 33, where the hut is located.

The "Northing" component is quoted first on a separate line from the "Easting" component. They are labelled as "UTM x" and "UTM y".

When you check the values, it transpires that the "UTM x" is in fact the "Northing" component. This is completely counter-intuitive: the practice of using x as the horizontal component on graphs is universal. Not many people will visualise the Earth with its axis horizontal!

[If you do not wish to check their values on a map or translate then from the Latitude and Longitude values, then the give-away is that their "UTM x" value has one more digit than the "UTM y" value.]

My eventual understanding was that the hut was located at
33T 0297697 5270174.

What was actually written was the following....
UTM x: 5270174
UTM y: 297697
Bezugsmeridian: 15°
Click here to have the 15° explained!

It certainly took me some time before I worked out what they were doing (I had no previous knowledge of where the hut was located). Once I latched on to their system, I could then start entering this and other hut locations in my GPS unit. Hopefully the experience will make me quicker in unravelling any non-standard data in the future.

Added April 05

I now own a digital copy of the Alpenvereinskarten. This gives the UTM coordinates of the mouse pointer and the good news is that they are nearly standard .

The location of the hut at
33T 0297697 5270174 is shown as
Ost: 33: 297,697 Nord: 5,270,174 UTM

That is fairly easy to comprehend. (The missing T would only have made sure it that the location was not one in the southern hemisphere) I have today looked again at the OAV page for the specimen hut and it still gives the UTM coordinates in the bizarre and confusing fashion described above.